PROVENANCE
West End Gallery, Montreal
Collection privée, Ontario
Art canadien d’après-guerre et contemporain, Maison de vente aux enchères Heffel, 28 novembre 2013, lot 51
Collection privée, Toronto

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
William Kuhns et Léo Rosshandler, Sam Borenstein, 1978, pages 49, 54 et 92
Loren Lerner, Sam Borenstein, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, 2005, pages 38 et 42

Sam Borenstein began painting in the Laurentians north of Montreal in the early 1940s. Unlike his Montreal street scenes, he now painted with a greater expressiveness and bolder colour. As William Kuhns observed, the landscapes, “evoke a mood altogether different from the dour, vagrantly sad, city studies – bright greens thrash with yellows in a grassy field; clouds move in a gorging rush of white impasto, reminiscent of Vlaminck; trees and bushes become a splashwork of apposite strokes and colour, flaking off one another like sparks.” His landscapes are rarely devoid of the human presence and include village churches and older houses, destabilized by a tornado of paint. As Leo Rosshandler wrote, “It was during the last ten or twelve years of his life that he found his own way of seeing and painting the world. These were the years of his greatest achievement.” Here a bridge traverses the river and anchors the composition. Foliage, painted with a palette knife in brilliant yellows and reds, defines the foreground in a composition very similar to his painting Mont-Rolland, Autumn of c. 1962, reproduced in Lorne Lerner’s catalogue. Borenstein dated this canvas to a specific day, 5 October 1961. The product of his entire life to that day, the painting was most likely painted in a single sitting, so characteristic of the artist’s amazing energy.

We thank Charles C. Hill, former curator of Canadian art from 1980 to 2014 at the National Gallery of Canada and author of The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation, for contributing the above essay.

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